NES hack

Why do only the new game consoles get all the cool peripherals? Being a man of action, [Paul] set out to change that. He had a Kinect V2 and an original Nintendo and thought it would be fun to get the two to work together.

Thinking it would be easiest to emulate a standard controller, [Paul] surfed the ‘net a bit until he found an excellent article that explained how the NES controller works. It turns out that besides the buttons, there’s only one shift register chip and some pull up resistors in the controller. Instead of soldering leads to a cannibalized NES controller, he decided to stick another shift register and some resistors down on a breadboard with a controller cable connected directly to the chip.

An Arduino is used to emulate the buttons presses. The Arduino is running the Firmata sketch that allows toggling of the Arduino pins from a host computer. That host computer runs an application that [Paul] wrote himself using the Kinect V2 SDK that converts the gestures of the player into controller commands which then tells the Arduino which buttons to ‘push’. This is definitely a pretty interesting and involved project, even if the video does make it look very challenging to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser and the Koopalings!

If you’d like to help the project or just build one for yourself, check out the source files on the Kinect4NES GitHub page.

If you weren’t looking forward to trying to find a NES Four Score just to rip connectors out of it or were reluctant to cut the ends off your NES controllers and use different connectors for your NES hack, you’re in luck. Parallax has released an NES controller connector (7-pin, male) that is compatible with the Nintendo controller. They also provide the socket pinout. It’s interesting to see a product like this come out so long after the original console, a testament to the popularity.